The recipe is one of those “what to do with the ingredients available” chimeras. I found the Juniperitivo recipe online, but didn’t have anymore mint (hence the sweet basil) and didn’t want to boil up a simple syrup (thus, agave).

Louisville Mules. Essentially, they are just a Moscow Mule (2 shots of vodka, 1 of fresh lime juice, lots of ice, topped with ginger ale) with some mint leaves crushed in the bottom of the glass (the plague of mint continues).

Mint Juleps. Jim Beam was on sale so I’m using it to eradicate this bumper crop of mint. Needs must.

Mine is a Philistine’s mint julep. Use a Collins shaker and pour 4 shots of bourbon on top of 1 shot of agave syrup (or a simple syrup or, even, 4 spoonfuls of confectioners’ sugar). Pack in a healthy amount of crushed ice (from about 4 ice cubes). Seat the steel side and shake the living shit out of it … especially if you went the powdered sugar route. When either the metal gets frosty or the ice is melted (we’ve returned to the heat wave conditions of last month), pour it over some — or a lot of — freshly plucked mint.*

Everyone does an End-Of-The-Year retrospective and I almost always do, too (here’s 2016’s review, for example). Remember, this blog is about pubs and running more than anything else and most of what remains is primarily adolescent humour. With that caveat, I bring you the Year 2017 In Review:

The Running Year 2017 (painfully detailed post to follow) was only salvaged in the last 1/3 of the year despite an initially strong start. I started training for the Siracusa Marathon which had been cancelled at the last moment in 2016 and which was again cancelled this year nearly 3 months before it was scheduled to run. Shit. However, this left me in pretty good shape for tackling the London Outer Orbital Path mostly in May (while Jackie was Stateside), averaging more than 6½ miles per day and one week over 90 miles.

But, a prolonged respiratory infection hit me the first week of June (lingering for another week and with a relapse mid-July) and a spot of cancer related depression thereafter pushed my weekly mileage down significantly. I had only managed to hit 1000 miles for the year by mid-August.

Fortuitously, I came into possession of a block of hash and a few very oily buds of home grown pot and, with their help and guidance, rediscovered the joys of hard training with no specific goal. Well, one specific goal: I decided to try to salvage the annual mileage with a modest 1600 by year’s end, upping that to 1800 as it became clear 1600 was going to fall easily, eventually ending on 2022. Now, if I hadn’t already blown through the weed I might target some real mileage for 2018.

At cocktail bars, I’m ridiculed by bartenders when I order something old-style like a Manhattan or a Side-Car. But, going by the evidence in the Ruislip Cemetery, the Tom Collins is quite literally dead. R.I.P.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though. Thursday I had to endure a bit of photography based biopsy of some more skin cancers before we were free to go to the Church Street Market in St John’s Wood and then wander around Ealing. The marvelous art deco building at the top of this posting can be found at the intersection of Luton and Penfold in St John’s Wood. After a run down to Hanger Lane, we settled into martinis and some BBQ chicken.

Friday was devoted to household chores such as strimming our weed-and-food-wrapper filled lawn then hanging out in Ruislip thrift stores. Out the back gate, I fought nettles and thorns to gather enough blackberries for some infused vodka (a Thanksgiving treat, if all goes well).

Saturday, I used some of the charity shop finds to start fermenting a jar of garlic then roasted the remaining heads to make a batch of pesto. To ferment garlic, peel the cloves (the last layer should be left on at least a few of them as this is where the bacteria and yeasts that do the work will be found). Leave some head space and pour a brine of 1 TBS non-iodized (think Kosher) salt per liter of chlorine-free water. Weigh the cloves down, cover, and check back every now and again for 4-6 weeks. Use this like roasted garlic although it should still be firm enough to grate. If you add it at the end of a recipe (that is, don’t cook it), you can diversify your gut microbiome with these.

Blitz all of this together, taste, and adjust to taste whilst trying hard not to eat it all during preparation.

The second fermentation project (remember, this is all about St Arnold), is a turmeric bug, sort of a starter culture for carbonated lemonades and limeades. Wash the turmeric but chop it up skins and all to make about 3 teaspoons. Add this and 3 teaspoons of brown sugar to 750 mL of water. Cover and put it in an airing cabinet or other stable, warm place. Feed it, daily, 3 more tsp each of turmeric and sugar until it starts to bubble up pretty good (as much as a week) then transfer to the fridge to slow it down. Feed the bug with a TBS of sugar each week. A half cup of the bug juice plus a half cup of sugar in a gallon of lemon water makes your fizzy lemonade (use Grolsch bottles to store it).

Things went a bit awry Sunday as I broke a cocktail glass then Frank Sinatra screwed us: One For My Baby, the last cut on Only the Lonely, was far enough toward the warning track on the album that our turntable shut off and I had to turn the disk by hand (the very hands, I remind you, that had just clumsily dropped a cocktail glass).

Eating well is the best cure for a streak of bad luck like this and I opted for a big pot of prawn Phô. I couldn’t find unpeeled shrimps at the store but I had some frozen bits of sea bream in the freezer from last week and combined them with some existing broth and vegetables to cook into a makeshift fish broth (normally I’d use the prawn heads and shells). Cassoulet may be my Desert Island Dish, but if I were able to find some way to make noodles and gather seafood this would diversify my menu.

So, now it is off to work … and, on a proper Holy Day, no less. The plan is to down a Dubbel in Arnold’s name ahead of barbecuing some burgers tonight (although that should probably be some “Brugers”).

There were four recipes for Dandelion Wine in my copy of the Farmer’s Weekly Home Made Country Wines, Beer, Mead, & Metheglin (c 1955) and I took what I thought to be the best bits of numbers 3 & 4 with some small variations based on the supplies available on the day. The basic recipe was:

The early Spring, this year, brought a horde (or should that be ‘hoard’) of dandelions around the neighbourhood and it only took about twenty minutes (including a brief chat with an elderly neighbour about her friend who collects these for her tortoise: “do YOU have a tortoise?”) to gather a large bowl of flowers.

For the sugar, I bought a kg of demerara and topped it up with 380 g brewer’s sugars and 120 g of dark brown muscovado (1.5 kg or 3.3 pounds).

All those ingredients went into a stainless steel pot (there was still a bit of the green parts of the heads on the flower but I think the final product might taste good a little bitter) and brought to a boil, left to bubble for an hour, then cool for the next 4 hours. This wort was strained onto the juice of the lemon and orange, a teaspoon of yeast nutrients, and 2 crushed Campden tablets then left till the following afternoon.

The two recipes I was using were especially compelling because they used baker’s yeast for the fermentation. When I got home from a post-work run the next day, I poured a cup of the wort over 3/4 ounce (21 g) of bread yeast and let it get a start before shaking the bottle well and pitching the culture.

I took the patient route and, once the ferment slowed to almost nothing (about 3 weeks), I racked into a clean carboy and allowed it to settle on its own for 3 more weeks then racked again (off the lees) adding the inhibitor and a Campden tablet and shaking occasionally for a few days to mix the chemicals and release the CO2 (the test dram was a bit acidic). Bottled 25 May, ready next Spring.